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The cool drippings of midnight are slick as rainwater clings to her long hair, announcing her arrival in silence, the way it should be. The stake in her hand is dripping with inhuman blood, congealing alongside the dirt and the water, glistening red in the reflection of the gas lamps that light the street. As she walks, she’s on alert; having killed five vampires already tonight, she knows that they’ll have her scent and be out for revenge. Even though her life is in peril, she never feels more alive as when she’s spitting on the corpses of the now twice dead, taking revenge for what they took from her ten years ago.
She keeps her parents’ faces immortalised in portraits, tightly clasped in a locket around her neck. Although she was only thirteen years old when they were bitten, it became back then a marker of her transition into forced adulthood, when she had to drive a stake through the heart of her mother and then her father, committing them to dust and ash on a pyre in the backyard rather than let them rampage the town.
It had only taken her three hours to pack up her things and skip town, and she’s been a vampire hunter ever since. It’s dirty work that demands to be done cleanly, and she’s trained herself in the highest regard of assassination, to a level of pride that can only come with never quite achieving revenge, and always having something yet to fight for.
Lightning hits the ground, and she whips around, fearing that the sudden burst will illuminate anything that has been following her. But, thankfully, she’s alone on the street, and contemplating retiring for the night. There’s no point wearing herself thin with the amount she’s killed already this evening; it’ll only put her in danger of being attacked when she’s at her weakest.
So, she knocks on the door of a little inn and waits until someone answers it. There’s a man there, about a foot taller than her, with purple hair tied back and an inviting smile.
She’s learned never to trust inviting smiles.
Clutching the stake behind her back, she asks, “Are you open?”
“Of course we are, darlin’! Come inside out of the cold.”
She steps inside, concealing the stake, now, under her jacket. He guides her to a back room, where he shows her a bed that she can sleep in. Checking to see if the bedroom door has a lock, she bids him goodnight and takes a candle from the front desk, retreating into the darkness of her room. Even in sleep, she has to be ready to defend herself, so she sleeps with the stake next to her.
It’s late when she wakes to the sound of someone beside her. Being a light sleeper, she’s initially surprised that she didn’t hear the lock turning or the door opening, but it takes her a fraction of a second - a fraction of a second too late - to recall that there’s only one creature that can operate with such stealth.
There are sharp teeth sinking into her neck, and venom courses through her body, burning through every channel and every capillary, aching as the poison seeps into her and drags her to whatever kind of death awaits her. She tries to reach for the stake, but the vampire hurls it across the room, pushing its face into her neck again and drinking her blood. Helpless, she cries. She’s not scared, she’s angry. It was inevitable, really, that this would be how she dies, but she didn’t expect it to be so soon, so heartbreaking, before she could even kill every damn vampire in existence, no matter how fruitless that dream seems.
Suddenly, the vampire pulls back, light bursting from its chest as she sees that someone - her saviour - has staked it. When it writhes on the floor and, eventually, dies, she looks up to see the inn manager standing over the corpse, stake in hand, trembling with confusion.
“You’re not a…vampire?”
“W-What, and you are?” Maki responds, trying to seem strong despite the searing pain that’s gripping her into a vice around her whole body, like a boa constrictor aching for her death.
“Well, yeah. Obviously. This is a vampire friendly inn. I thought we had enough of a reputation around town for people to keep quiet and let us be.”
She launches for the stake, but he pulls it back.
“Hey, if I was gonna kill you, why would I save you first?”
“W-What’s g-going on?”
“Here, hold on,” he says, sitting next to her. He moves her hair, slick with the sweat of sleep, fever, and panic, from the bite on her neck, before sinking down so that his mouth is touching the wound. She think it’s a cruel fate that she was allowed one last glimmer of hope before death, but the pain is slowly dissipating. Chalking it up to blood loss, she tries to pull away from him, but he lays his hands on her face and makes her look at him.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he says, “but that vampire was a nasty one. There’s venom in your system, and it’ll turn you or kill you depending on your strength. My bite has anaesthetic, it’ll remove the pain whilst whatever happens, happens.”
“I’m not fucking becoming one of you,” she spits.
“That’s out of my hands, anyway. I’m just trying to make the inevitable painless,” he replies with a soft smile, going back to her neck. As much as she hates to admit it, he’s right. The pain is slowly drifting from her, and she finds herself leaning into him; his soft, cold lips almost make her forget that he is the thing she hates.
When he moves back, there’s a trickle of blood down the side of his mouth, and he looks sad. She wants to kill him, even though he’s done his best to help her, but there’s no energy left in her body. Trying to stand up, her vision blurs and greys out from the outside inwards, and then she’s falling.
He catches her.
“Whoa there, darlin’. Steady. You have to recover.”
Flitting in and out of consciousness, she feels him lie her down in bed. He must know that she’s cold, because he puts the blanket over her, leaving and returning again with more pillows and duvets so that the blood loss doesn’t cause hypothermia. She begs whatever Gods are listening to kill her in her sleep, let her die from the bite rather than become a vampire.
No such luck. She wakes, her mind thick with illusion and memory. When she touches her face, both her hands and her cheeks are freezing cold, and there’s a strange feeling in her stomach, a thirst for something that she swore she would never want to understand.
“Hey,” he says, when he walks into her room, “you’re awake. It’s been three days.”
“You have to kill me.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“The outcome is the same either way,” he sits on a chair next to her bed, handing her a bowl with a thick, viscous red liquid inside. Rationally, she wants to throw it away, but she aches to taste it, to fill the void inside her, and she drinks.
“There ya go,” he continues, “it ain’t that bad when ya get used to it.”
“N-No way,” she says, “I’m not living like this. I’m not becoming this.”
“Sweetheart, you’ve already become it. If you wanna run outta that door and get yourself killed, be my guest. But not all of us live like monsters.”
“Really? You’ve just handed me blood to drink? And I’m doing it!”
“It’s animal blood. It’s what I live on. Some of us have to make an honest living, ya know?”
“I can’t do it.”
“That’s your choice. But it’s a choice you’ll have to make when you’re rested and completely better. In the meantime, it’s my duty to take care of you.”
“I don’t need anyone to take care of me!”
“I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t, since you got turned in my inn, ’n all.”
“I couldn’t care less about your personal relationship with redemption. You’re a vampire!”
“So are you.”
“Not for long.”
“Doesn’t matter how long you live. You’ll still die a vampire, when you do.”
“Why are you saying all this to me? Don’t you think I have it hard enough?”
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting that I’ve been through the exact same shit. ’N I’m still here. Some of us gotta survive.”
“Well, not me.”
“Like I said, decide that when you’re better. But think about it for a while. You think all vampires are bad, don’t’cha?”
“They are all bad.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Some of us just want to do as much good as we can. Y’know, prove our existence wrong?”
“Justify it how you want, you’re nothing more than scum.”
He laughs. “You won’t offend me. I’ve heard it all, even before I turned. But you need rest. I won’t stop you making any decisions, but I will make you hold off on them until you’re of sound mind.”
He adjusts the pillows behind her, smiling at her. She can’t understand why he doesn’t see disgust in her, but the kindness and compassion that she sees in his eyes are genuine. There’s no harm in sleeping for a moment.
As she closes her eyes, she feels him hold her hand and take the seat next to her. Logically, she knows that he’s watching to make sure she doesn’t jump out of the window and either kill herself or go on a killing spree, but some part of her wants to imagine that there’s another reason. Another reason for all of this.